FTFA: "Supersymmetry is not ruled out by our measurement but it is strongly confined,"

What else is new? *giggles*

In all seriousness, the LHC is pretty much systematically ruling out the space of plausible minimal supersymmetry theories at this point. There's this big chart of "tests for theory X" with bars ever creeping rightward towards a line that says "ruled out." Even though we know New Stuff has to appear around the few-TeV level (impossible predictions for some vector boson scattering cross-sections there, and whatever keeps the top quark's mass from diverging), nobody's got too much of a plausible theory for it yet.

Things are going to get very interesting after the LHC starts up at 14TeV in 2014. It ought to put a lot of questions to rest.

erik-k:FTFA: "Supersymmetry is not ruled out by our measurement but it is strongly confined,"

What else is new? *giggles*

In all seriousness, the LHC is pretty much systematically ruling out the space of plausible minimal supersymmetry theories at this point. There's this big chart of "tests for theory X" with bars ever creeping rightward towards a line that says "ruled out." Even though we know New Stuff has to appear around the few-TeV level (impossible predictions for some vector boson scattering cross-sections there, and whatever keeps the top quark's mass from diverging), nobody's got too much of a plausible theory for it yet.

Things are going to get very interesting after the LHC starts up at 14TeV in 2014. It ought to put a lot of questions to rest.

It seems to me that none of the theories past the standard model are panning out.

satanorsanta:erik-k: FTFA: "Supersymmetry is not ruled out by our measurement but it is strongly confined,"

What else is new? *giggles*

In all seriousness, the LHC is pretty much systematically ruling out the space of plausible minimal supersymmetry theories at this point. There's this big chart of "tests for theory X" with bars ever creeping rightward towards a line that says "ruled out." Even though we know New Stuff has to appear around the few-TeV level (impossible predictions for some vector boson scattering cross-sections there, and whatever keeps the top quark's mass from diverging), nobody's got too much of a plausible theory for it yet.

Things are going to get very interesting after the LHC starts up at 14TeV in 2014. It ought to put a lot of questions to rest.

It seems to me that none of the theories past the standard model are panning out.

Unfortunately, yeah you've pretty much hit the nail on the head. Just about every few months now I sit through another seminar with someone proposing a new theory/interaction/particle/etc (whose clipped quantum theorist notation and talking goes right over my head).

Honestly I don't expect much to happen until we flat-up detect a mystery particle and thereby get some idea of its mass/spin/charge. There's a basically endless supply of particles, fields and interactions one can posit that aren't inconsistent with the basic precepts of QFT, and without some data to hint at what's actually going on I think it's fairly well hopeless.

I think it's analagous to the discovery of quarks and the strong force, in that we made basically no progress until electron-hadron scattering experiments revealed the substructure of protons and neutrons (including that they have substructure in the first place).